I think we have to be very careful pointing the blame for stuff like healthcare, policing etc unless you have inside knowledge.
The NHS has had increased funding but that was slashed under the previous gov for 14 years, pay rises were frozen or capped at 1% depending where you were and of course NHS staff are constantly used as political footballs by politicians trying to blame others for the messes they make.
Example 1
Cut nurses bursary. Nurses now need a degree to enter so that’s 3 years of £10k tuition fees plus if you get a maintenance loan if you qualify the bursary was to encourage more entrants which is now gone. Then you get to apply to be a nurse at the very bottom which is £29k which sounds like a lot but say you had a similar 3 year engineering degree you could go straight in on £50k just a quick example.
As a nurse you’ll be working ungodly hours both length and shifts and be physically and emotionally wrecked esp at the start of your career.
As an engineer you might work slme late nights but odds are you’ll be 9-5 mon-fri
Now you get freshly qualified nurses and Dr’s and who comes along (I have some experience of seeing this) but up pops countries like Australia who say hey come work our healthcare, we won’t treat you badly, we’ll set you up with a career, somewhere to live and after 5 years well sponsor your naturalisation….
This is at least partly why the NHS has some 111,000 vacancies (as of March 2025) we are training new staff but when other countries offer a package like that as a young person looking for a career why wouldn’t you go?
Part of the reason the NHS needs so much money is disastrous decisions like the top down reorganisation by Cameron who made GPs run Primary care (partly why you can’t get an appointment now they’re in meetings etc)
Another reason being the huge sums that are going to private companies to run NHS contracts. Not that long ago hospitals employed cleaners and caterers but not now they pay Serco to do it, who often do a poor job.
The best bits of the NHS have been carved out and part privatised, get that back into the NHS and stop haemorrhaging money.
NHS is target driven, largely by stat obsessed Tories who pit hospitals against each other with league tables and as such means you need a host of people to extract data, create statistics, then you “need” loads of management more money wasted. How often do you hear of stupid wages for non clinical staff? Our local hospital the Chief Exec is on £250,000 that’s plus bonuses that are not publically disclosed. All the time whilst charging nurses and Dr’s £30-60 a month to park at work (England, not Wales or Scotland)
Now the NHS is broken up into regional bodies so each body needs management and clerical staff so multiply that cost by 215 (total trusts in the UK)
Ladtly for now PFI. Basically invented and loved by John Major then used by Blair too. It’s essentially a mortgage to build schools or hospitals etc. So private finance pays for the hospital but they then say we control parking or we get to put all the vending machines in or we own the patient TV system stuff like that
Anyway it’s a total disaster basically nearly bankrupting hospitals and again that’s where the moneys going.
Read more here
In short it’s decades of politicians picking up the NHS like a snow globe and shaking the shit out of it and watching it settle.
The NHS has been run into the ground since 2010. Look how great it was from 1998 to 2009 Blair and Brown got that right fwiw.
Lastly (again) it’s stupid decisions. Our hospital in Norwich, years ago it was in the city centre but they wanted that for posh housing so they moved the hospital to the outskirts near the University. They started building the hospital BEFORE they got planning permission for a link road to the A47 which was denied. So now the way to the hospital is either thru a housing estate or via the B1108 not an A road.
For a growing county they built a new hospital with fewer beds despite a growing population locally and closing rural hospitals down.
Since then the site has been an almost constant building site where they desperately add buildings or add a wing to the hospital so you access the new ward by going thru another ward. They had to get a private company to build a multi storey car park as there’s too little parking, so bad at times they had to open staff car parks as people were missing outpatient appointments. The new car park is not run by the hospital so no parking validation, so if you’re there for 12 hours with your wife in labour say normally the hospital would stamp your ticket and you’d pay £2 but no park in there no validation you pay full price £15.
Its all of this stuff added up that’s the real in efficiencies.
I’m about to contact a lawyer to see if we have a case the way they’ve treated my 19 year old son this week which ended up with him getting a perforated bowel and emergency surgery as they waited over 36 hours to get a ct scan. He’s seriously ill and lucky to be alive right now.